The Maurya Empire was an Indian empire which existed in the Indian Subcontinent from 322 to 185 BC, with Pataliputra (Patna) serving as its capital. It was founded in 322 BC by Chandragupta Maurya, who overthrew the Nanda Empire before reconquering the Greek satrapies of central and western India. By 317 BC, the empire had fully reoccupied northwestern India, and, from 305 to 303 BC, the Mauryans went to war with the Seleucid Empire and acquired lands west of the Indus River. Under Bindusara (r. 298-272 BC), the empire expanded into southern India, and emperor Ashoka (r. 268-232 BC) completed this process by conquering Kalinga; he also introduced Buddhism as the state religion, replacing Chandragupta's religion of Jainism and proselytizing the faith in Sri Lanka, northwest India, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Egypt, and the Greek world. In 185 BC, the Mauryan Empire dissolved with the foundation of the Shunga dynasty.
Background[]
Ancient Indian civilizations developed in the swathe of territory across the north of the Indian Subcontinent from the Indus valley in the west to the Ganges in the east.
Evidence for warfare in ancient India comes mostly from the Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata. This recounts the 18-day battle of Kurukshetra between the rival clans of the Pandavas and the Kauravas. The Mahabharata is a legend rather than history, but it sketches a style of warfare that was probably true to life. Both sides assembled and supplied large armies, both fought in horse-drawn chariots, and both employed war elephants. The chief weapons were the bow, the javelin, and the mace.
History[]
King Porus
In 326 BC the Macedonian conqueror, Alexander the Great, led an army through the Hindu Kush into northern India. He was confronted by tthe army of a king whom the invaders called Porus, the ruler of a powerful state in the Punjab. The size of Porus' army seems to have been impressive; accounts that have survived, written much later, suggest 20,000-30,000 infantry, 300 chariots, and possibly 200 war elephants deployed in the van.
Porus was defeated by Alexander at the Battle of Hydaspes, unable to cope with the devastating flexibility of the Macedonian cavalry and the discipline of the infantry phalanx. Both sides were to be influenced by this collision of cultures. Alexander's successors adopted the elephant, while in India a young man called Chandragupta Maurya was inspired to regenerate Indian military power and to emulate Alexander's campaigns of conquest.
Chandragupta's origins are obscure and so is his precise relationship with Alexander (it is unclear whether the two men actually met), but by around 321 BC he had established himself as the ruler of the kingdom of Magadha, seizing power from the Nanda dynasty in a series of well-orchestrated military campaigns. Thsi was a startling achievement given the sophisticated nature of the Nanda state's amred forces. Chandragupta may have employed a form of guerrilla warfare, for some sources suggest thhat outlying areas were progressively taken under the rebels' control until a tightening noose closed around the Nanda capital.
War with the Seleucid Empire[]
Chandragupta's authority was initially concentrated in the east of the Indian Subcontinent, in Bihar and Bengal, but soon he pressed westward, filling the power vacuum left by Alexander's rampaging campaign and subsequent withdrawal. By 305 the Indus River had become the border between Chandragupta's realm and the territory claimed by Alexander's former general, Seleucus Nicator. Between 305 and 303 the Mauryans and Seleucids fought a war for the control of Gandhara, a wealthy region covering what is now Kashmir, northern Pakistan, and eastern Afghanistan. Although there is no historical record of the fighting, Chandragupta must have won the war, since Gandhara passed into Mauryan hands. In the peace treaty that ended the conflict, Chandragupta agreed to provide 500 elephants for Seleucus' army as a sign of good faith - an impressive number of animals, but small compensation for the loss of such valuable lands.
At this time Chandragupta ruled from the Ganges plain across to the Indus and hte northwestern borderlands of the subcontinent, as well as part of central India. This formidable empire was visited by a Greek envoy of Seleucus, called Megasthenes, who wrote an account of what he saw on his trip. According to Megasthenes, warriors were one of the seven castes into which Mauryan society was divided. These were full-time, highly trained professional soldiers - men who "practice nothing but warlike exercises" and "receive high pay from the state" in war and peace alike. The money they received was sufficient for them to pay for servants, grooms for their horses, charioteers, and men "to keep their weapons bright and manage the elephants." Megasthenes emphasized the warriors' high morale, twice describing them as being of "good cheer." Indian warfare was dominated by the use of misile weapons; Megasthenes states that close-quarters battle "rarely happens between Indians." Their bow, the standard infantry weapon, was "equal in length to the man who carrie sit" and shot a long, heavy arrow that could penetrate any armor. Foot soldiers also carried a broad, two-handed sword and a long, narrow ox-hide shield. The horsemen were light cavalry skirmishers, riding bareback and throwing javelins. War elephants were crewed by a mahout (elephant driver) and four soldier swho shot arrows and threw javelins from atop the animal's back. The elephant's main military use, however, was less as a weapons platform than as a weapon in itself; it was used to trample enemy infantry and gore them with its tusks.
Chandragupta died around 298 BC. The resources provided by his conquered territories no doubt facilitated further expansion of th Mauryan empire under his successors. Bindusara,w ho ruled until 272 BC, pressed further south along the west coast of India as far as Mysore, but it was Bindusara's son, Ashoka, who took the Mauryan empire to its furthest limits.
Reign of Ashoka[]
Although the details of his life are poorly documented, Ashoka appears to have been a formidable warrior from an early age and to have won a vicious armed struggle for the succession against his brothers in the four years after his father's death. His most famous campaigns as ruler were fought around 265-262 BC against the kingdom of Kalinga on the east coast of India. Ashoka's first invasion of Kalingan territory was repulsed, leading him to assemble overwhelming forces for a second campaign. The Kalingans again resisted, but they were overcome after a savage battle by the Daya River. According to an inscription attributed to Ashoka himself, 100,000 Kalingans were killed and 150,000 were deported (presumably as slaves) and many more died as a result of the devastation wrought by the war and its aftermath. The smae inscription states that Ashoka later experienced an extreme revulsion against the brutality of conquest. This led him to convert to Buddhism.
A peaceful Buddhist state[]
Ashoka appears to have broadly followed Buddhist precepts in the benevolent later years of his reign, which ended peacefully in 234 BC. There is no suggestion that he disbanded his army or abandoned the use of force, but any sensitivity to the sufferings of a defeated enemy and th human cost of war is so rare in the pre-modern world that Ashoka undoubtedly deserves his reputation as an exceptionally humane individual.
The Mauryan Empire united more of the Indian Subcontinent that any state until the Mughals in the 16th century AD, leaving out only the southernmost area of the great peninsula and Sri Lanka. Yet the empire outlived Ashoka for only 50 years. The last Mauryan emperor, Brihadratha, was overthrown in a coup in 185 BC and the various component parts of the empire went their independent ways.
Aftermath[]
One legacy of the Mauryan empire was an idea of the potential unity of India. In practice, the subcontinent was disunited and exposed to invasions from the north.
The Gupta Empire[]
A variety of states flourished in the aftermath of the Mauryan Empire, including an Indo-Greek Kingdom (an offshoot of Alexander the Great's conquests) ruled in the 2nd century BC by Menander Soter in the area of modern-day Pakistan and northern India. The most ambitious attempt to recreate the Mauryan Empire was made by a dynasty that came to power in the 4th century AD, and whose first emperor adopted the name Chandragupta II - from which the dynastic name "Gupta" was then derived.
Between about 319 and 415, under Chandragupta II, Samudragupta, and Chandragupta III, the Gupta Empire expanded to claim suzerainty over a substantial area of the Indian subcontinent. One boastful Gupta inscription refers to Samudragupta's victories over 21 kings. However, historians have cast doubt on Gupta claims to have ruled distant parts of India that may in reality have only owed them some vague allegiance.
Nomadic incursions[]
In the 5th century the Guptas came under increasing pressure from the White Huns - steppe nomads from Central Asia who wore down the empire's defenses and eventually destroyed it, laying waste the cities and monasteries of the Ganges plain. But the Indian warrior tradition was far from exhausted, reviving from the 8th century in the Rajput kingdoms of northern India.
Gallery[]
